[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Fixing ICS (simply)

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> This will not change anything.  Paying upkeeps is not the slightest bit
> difficult as it is.  The reason people don't build city improvements is
> it takes a long time to build them in the first place.

Huh? Compared to units they are fast, because they do not penalize you 
nearly as much when you buy them instead of sitting out the full timespan. 
The penalisation is linear so you can basically buy them at any time 
instead of being encouraged to wait as long as you can before buying.

> > Make it harder to destroy city improvements by diplomats (but create
> > some kind of ignore's city walls unit earlier in the game).
> 
> Irrelevant when playing against AIs, as they never destroy your city
> improvements.  You are rarely interested in destroying theirs, because
> AIs are easy to beat and you want to grab their cities as intact as you
> can.  I think the whole mechanic of selling off city improvements is
> pretty silly.  You attack some huge AI city, boom! in one turn it's
> suddenly a farming hovel.  Unless you're talking strategic bombardment,
> it's totally unrealistic and worse, it's not a fun play mechanic.  I
> want to take the big AI city and get the stuff!

I hardly ever attack cities. Usually only capitals, since capitals cannot 
be bought. I usually just buy them, usually after having gotten 
industrialisation and often after having switched to democracy to save on 
corruption costs. I just do not use the combat-oriented path of 
development, I ignore horseriding and feusalism and tactics and such and 
instead head for railroad and industrialisation and democracy and maybe 
even espionage. All the stupid combat-unit stuff I end up getting free 
when I buy cities from the AIs later on in the game, or when forced to go 
steal gunpowder or tactics or trade unions to enable me to build 
sufficiently good defensive units.

-MarkM- 

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